Internet Adult Film Database

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The Internet Adult Film Database (iafd) is an online database of information pertaining to, in the United States, the pornography industry: actors, actresses, directors, studios, distributors and pornographic films.

History

The predecessor to iafd was an email- and FTP-accessible database of Pornographic film actresses called Abserver that had been created by Dan Abend in 1993.

iafd itself was started by Peter van Aarle, who had collected data on adult movies since 1981 when he began keeping notes on index cards on adult movies he had seen or were reviewed in Adam Film World. In 1993, he began contributing to the Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.movies, where he met Dan Abend. The two exchanged databases and began work on a WWW-based database.

Van Aarle later collaborated on this Web database with Ron Wilhelm, who went by the pseudonym of "Heretic". The first version of the iafd was brought online in 1995 by the programming efforts of Wilhelm, who used the project as a training ground for SGML programming which he was learning in college. After Wilhelm left the Internet to join the military, the site eventually fell victim to link rot.

In the fall of 1998, Van Aarle was at a trade show with Jeff Vanzetti, who asked if Van Aarle would be interested in resurrecting the iafd — this time under its own domain. Vanzetti was looking for a project on which to teach himself online database programming using SQL Server, and this seemed like a natural fit since they were both co-moderators of the newsgroup rec.arts.movies.erotica (RAME), and members of the newsgroup would often lament about the passing of the original Internet Adult Film Database.

The beginning of 1999 brought the first steps towards the relaunch of the iafd. Initially, search boxes only searched females, and data was restricted to movies released post-1989.

Van Aarle said on this:

In those early days of the iafd I had made one stipulation: I did not want the movie info on movies before 1989 to be available. The idea behind this was basically that if I would ever decide I wanted to do something commercially with my database it would be a good idea to keep the most valuable parts of it off-limits. The data on older titles was clearly the most difficult to compile (and very few people I ever talked to had much info on the older stuff, with a few notable exceptions like Jim Holliday), and therefore the more valuable part of the data. The cut-off date of 1989 was a compromise to include at least the titles of Buttman, who was one of the most popular directors of the time.

Van Aarle died on September 18, 2005, at the age of 42 from a heart attack. In 2011, he was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame.

On March 1, 2007, the iafd rolled out information on over 18,000 gay titles and some 39,000 gay performers. Like the IMDb, forms are used for submitting data corrections, though the iafd's form is considerably simpler than the IMDb's. However, neither IMDb or iafd corrections are immediate; thus both correction services are fairly equal. According to the site, it contains entries on over 119,453 titles and 111,498 persons (both actors and directors).

According to Vanzetti, iafd adds about 500 new titles a month and processes thousands of corrections—corrections that anyone can submit for review. iafd has a "team of editors" that exercises editorial control over what's posted on the site: "If it's submitted by a fan of the performer and the working editor trusts the submitter, it gets listed. If it's published by someone else, it might get added—we are skeptical of user-generated sites since anyone can submit anything to them regardless of accuracy, and then it becomes 'fact'. Otherwise, no data." iafd's policy on releasing real names of Pornographic film performers is: "The exception to this rule is when it comes to real names. We're not interested in linking your real name to your porn name, so if your real name appears on the site, we will remove it (assuming we know what your real name is). However, if your real name appeared on a box cover due to a mix-up in the Art Department, there's little we can do about that."

iafd gets "paid by sponsors for ad banners", and they "get an affiliate commission from products purchased" via the site.

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